For businesses large and small, relying on a cloud-based collaboration and productivity suite such as Microsoft Office 365 is becoming the norm. Enhancing productivity in your organisation is vital to get ahead in 2017 - and using Office 365 can help, if it's used right...

"APT30 predominantly targets entities that may satisfy government intelligence collection requirements. The vast majority of APT30's victims are in Southeast Asia," read the paper.

"Much of their social engineering efforts suggests the group is particularly interested in regional political, military and economic issues, disputed territories, and media organisations and journalists who report on topics pertaining to China and the government's legitimacy."

The group reportedly infects victims using phishing messages, and deploys a sophisticated set of attack tools and backdoors that have been developed over the past 10 years.

"Although APT30 has used a variety of secondary or supporting tools over the years their primary tools have remained remarkably consistent over time, namely the backdoors Backspace and Neteagle, and a set of tools believed to be designed to infect air-gapped networks via infected removable drives," read the report.

FireEye highlighted the APT30 group's long running success using the same attack strategy as being particularly troubling.

"Typically, threat groups who register domains for malicious use will abandon them after a few years. APT30, however, has used some of their domains for more than five years," read the report.

"For such a long operational history, APT30 appears to have conducted their activity using a surprisingly limited number of tools and backdoors.

"One reason for this might be that they have had no need to diversify or add to their arsenal if they have been successful with their current approach."

The white paper said that, while attribution is always difficult, evidence suggests that APT30 may be sponsored by the Chinese authorities.

"Such a sustained, planned development effort, coupled with the group's regional targets and mission, leads us to believe that this activity is state sponsored, most likely by the Chinese government," read the report.

APT30 is one of many threat campaigns believed to have links to the Chinese government.